Tenerife will have the second museum of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin in Europe. The Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, led by José Manuel Bermúdez (CC), will spend 16 million euros on the acquisition of replicas of the artist’s works and on the rental of some original sculptures. This investment of public money has opened a new controversy in the municipality and has aroused the curiosity of some experts, who question the installation of a Rodin museum on an island with which the Frenchman had no ties.
Rodin’s business
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To streamline procedures, the capital’s City Council this summer declared the contract for the acquisition of sculptural works to endow the Rodin Museum a Municipal Strategic Project. The declaration, to which this newspaper has had access, justifies the expense in the City Council’s intention to give a boost to the economic activity of the municipality by strengthening the cultural sector.
In this line, the document also considers “strategic” the contracts that are “necessary to formalize” in order to dispose of the works for the museum or for the exhibition. In the documents to which this newspaper has had access, the Rodin Museum in France points out that all the costs of transporting the works are borne by the administration concerned.
The Rodin Museum of Tenerife is designed by the Spanish architect Fernando Menis and will be installed in the Viera y Clavijo Cultural Park. According to sources from the municipal corporation, the premises will occupy 60% of this space, which will be rehabilitated between 2023 and 2025. When the work is finished, the museum will begin to be operational, they point out from the City Council.
According to the documents included in the Museum file and consulted by this newspaper, the capital of Tenerife will buy 68 original sculptures and 15 replicas. The originals will require an expense of 13 million euros and among them will be the original bronze edition of the Victor Hugo Monument (2,500,000 euros), La Défense (1,500,000) and the Whistler Monument (1,000,000) or the standing nude (1,000,000) by Victor Hugo.
1,441,000 euros will be allocated to replicas. One of the copies purchased is The Thinker. For its part, among the rented works are The Kiss and the Gate of Hell. The latter is valued at 20 million euros and will be in Tenerife for 15 years.
A disputed appraisal
The University of La Laguna made an appraisal report of the sculptures for the City Council. The document concludes that more than 15 million euros are necessary for the endowment of the museum. The spokesman for Unidas Podemos in the City Council has questioned the appraisal for not being “independent”. Ramón Trujillo warns that the economic valuation of the sculptures is based on reports made by Jérome Le Blay, an expert linked to the Rodin Museum and “its campaign of posthumous editions and global expansion.”
“It would be logical to have a completely independent appraisal from the seller of the works, the Rodin Museum in Paris,” they point out from United We Can. In addition, they ensure that the Parisian Museum has resorted to an “aggressive strategy” of selling copies of the sculptor to deal with its financial problems.
Ramón Trujillo has also questioned the economic impact reports that appear in the file for showing an “exaggerated optimism bias.” This document indicates that the Rodin Museum of Santa Cruz could offer an economic benefit of 56 million euros “in the moderate scenario” and 132 million in the “optimistic” scenario.
For these reasons, the groups that make up the opposition (PSOE, Unidas Podemos and Ciudadanos) urged the mayor to stop the process of acquiring the works. The parties criticize that during the urgent processing of the project, the opposition groups have not been given access to negotiations. They also criticize that the large amounts that are being committed “a few months before the elections for various budgetary years” do not match the “weak” justifications that the reports put forward.
In an interview granted to Newspaper Notices, the director of the art centers of the autonomous government in Tenerife, Carlos Díaz-Bertrana, declared that, beyond the “historical and cultural nonsense” of installing the museum on the island, the “nonsense” and the ” scam” lie in the feasibility plan that seeks to justify the investment of 16 million euros. He also pointed out that if the museum became a reality, it would cause patrimonial damage to the City Council. ”If they go ahead they could fall into an embezzlement problem,” he warned in the interview.
The opposition also questions the number of visitors estimated to come to the museum and ticket revenue, which reportedly exceeds the original in Paris.
In the feasibility study prepared by the City Council, they draw an optimistic scenario in which the museum would receive 1,089,145 visitors in the fifth year of its opening, among tourists staying, cruise passengers, excursionists, and local visitors. In the conservative scenario, the establishment would receive 664,005 visitors in the fifth year.
The objective, according to this same study, is for the city to resemble other Spanish cities that have made culture one of their main attractions.
